No, I'm not dead yet.
Wow, it's been almost five years since I've posted here. After attending a con for the first time this weekend, I decided to check out my ol' profile here. Terrific news, everybody: I'm still kicking, and not dead yet!
So what's been going on with Sylvester lately? (It's presumptuous on my part to think that people on Goodreads care when I'm a such a small fish, but sometimes writing something out is more helpful for my own thought process and is good for reflection. If somebody actually reads this without gouging their eyes out: great! But otherwise it's good for me to just work away on the keyboard).
Let's backtrack a little. In 2015 or 2016, when I started my Goodreads account, I had returned to school as an undergrad studying for a second career. My first novel, A Detective from Geoduck Street, had been long in gestation, taking almost 20 years for me to put together, and I FINALLY finished a presentable (or so I thought, at the time) draft for self-publication in Fall 2015. It was a massive undertaking, and I know now that it was too big for my own good.
When that was completed, I, like many first-time authors, had high expectations. But while I made a few sales, I was disconcerted by the overall lack of response to it. It has taken years to get feedback from it in the form of reviews. Geoduck Street is a celebration of the Pacific Northwest region of Washington, Oregon and British Columbia. While I stopped short of making it secessionist literature, I did what I could to make it known to the Cascadian bioregional movement. Yet despite some initial interest, no one seemed to care enough to write a review. There was radio silence, and I began to question my enthusiasm for the project since no one else was enthusiastic.
There were two breaking points for me that moved me away from continuing with sequels to Geoduck Street.
First of all, I became annoyed how, after devoting significant years of my life to a project about the Pacific Northwest, some joker would create the "Doug flag" on a pair of socks, or a coffee mug, or a restaurant napkin, and suddenly receive 5,000 upvotes on the Cascadian subreddit, while any post I made about my book would be lucky to break 12 upvotes. I'm not complaining. Obviously my first book was a defective piece of writing, or something else non-positive about the book prevented people from enjoying it enough to write reviews. I own that. It's no one's fault but mine. I still love Geoduck Street and stand by whatever merit it possesses, but the tome needs a second edition. It needs a $5000 editing job and a $300 professional cover. Will I ever have the money to do that? I'm better off now than I was in 2015, but I can't say that I have a wad of cash like that sitting around.
The second reason I never pursued completing sequels was, quite frankly, the U. S. presidential election of 2016. I wrote Geoduck Street after having lived in the South, horrified that we in the Northwest share a common government with those states. I was a foreigner down there! Geoduck Street was something of a means of reclaiming an identity for myself. But Donald Trump (and his allies in Russia who would love nothing more than to see the United States fracture) has come along and put American democracy and freedom on life support. It's made me rethink my identity, and the positives of the United States, just as Billy Crudup in "Big Fish" is forced to come to peace with Albert Finney (or was it Brian Cox in that movie? Quite frankly, I can't tell the difference between the two). The system shock of the Trump presidency made me completely rethink the Union and its fragility. No matter my annoyance at the South, Vladimir Putin is a true enemy, and I have no further interest in American regional fractures at this time. I feel naïve now for having placed so much stock in regionalism for that book.
Following the completion of my second undergraduate degree, I headed off to start a second master's degree in 2017. Graduate school sucked. Big time. I survived, but it was one of the most stressful times in my life. I had forgotten how professional programs break you into pieces so that they can shape you back together again the way they want to. It was cognitive boot camp, and it wasn't fun, especially since I was an older student with a brain less neuroplastic as it once was.
Yet during those years I still managed to get some time in for writing. If I had gone all week without breaking from homework/studying, I would have burnt out. So between getting home on Fridays and waking up on Sundays, I enforced a "no school thought" policy for myself. Saturdays actually became extremely productive for me, and I self-published some of my best work during that time, all of them short stories or short story collections.
The standout was Piano Happens, a Dunsanian fantasy I wrote in spring 2018. I say "Dunsanian", but there were other humorous influences from the world of nihilism there, including Roadrunner cartoons and the Seinfeld sitcom. My original intention was to write fifty-one stories, just like Lord Dunsany's Fifty-One Tales, except that they all include the hero or heroine of the story getting killed, one way or another, by a piano. The last story would feature a character much like myself who intended to one-up Dunsany by composing a fifty-second tale, except that before he could do so, he would meet his untimely fate... by being crushed by a falling piano.
Such was my state of mind in graduate school, when I had so few outlets from the stress I was living through. After completing twenty stories, I put it aside and decided I would complete it at a different time. A year later, in spring 2019, I started reviewing the draft of Piano Happens with the intention of starting up again, only to find that it was perfect as it was. The twentieth story offered something of a conclusion, and even if I added another thirty tales as I planned, I was no longer in the same state of mind as I had been in 2018, so I went ahead and published it after going through the editing process.
Then, in May of that year, I received my first Amazon review. It was for Piano Happens. It came from a total stranger, and I'll never forget where I was standing when I read it on my Amazon page. To the stranger who wrote it: Thank you. I needed that positive reaction more than you could ever know.
I published a few more short works in 2019, and then my professional life completely took over. I needed to stay eye-on-the-ball with vigilance, and did so. I graduated at the end of 2019 with my master's degree and went to work for a company where I had interned. Life did a turn-around on me, and suddenly everything was nice and peaceful.
Then COVID-19 struck a few weeks later. I lucked out better than others, which is not to say that I wasn't stressed or impacted by it. At the time, I was working on another tale from Slorsh (the series that Piano Happens belongs to), when suddenly I couldn't go to Starbucks anymore and compose by longhand. I was aggravated by that, but never resentful, because I understood that my own personal situation could be worse. I'd wake up in the middle of the night from a dream in a cold sweat, thinking I was still in graduate school, only to come to the joyful realization that grad school was completed for me. Instead, all I had to worry about anymore was dying a miserable death from a painful disease, losing loved ones to the disease, and the country imploding into a dictatorship with a potential reelection of Donald Trump. Knowing that the grad school dream was ONLY a dream allowed me to go back to sleep with a smile on my face. At work, I masked up and happily followed health protocols, and decided to take the opportunity of the bizarre situation by doing something different: I started an e-comic and studied drawing for a year and a half.
The website I set up for that comic is now shut down; when the pandemic ended I went back to writing. But my interests and priorities have shifted away from my pre-pandemic interests.
Since 2021, I've been working on composing my own personal mythology. It's unavoidably a little like Tolkien's, but it's also more dreamlike as Dunsany's Pegana mythos and Lovecraft's Dreamland tales, and also weirdly individualistic like William Blake's mythology. It's less like Tolkien's Silmarillion, and more like his original "Book of Lost Tales", in that it's unkempt and full of wild flavors than need be harnessed and toned down. The first year I just worldbuilt and wrote out sketches, then in 2022 I slowly put together a publishable draft, which I produced at the end of the year. In 2023 I expanded and edited the 2022 draft, and now in 2024 I'm expanding and editing the 2023 draft. It's my magnum opus, and I plan on publishing a new edition of the work every year for the rest of my life. It's nothing I actually want to share yet, so I set a ridiculously large price so that no one would buy it.
But sooner or later I'll have to turn my attention back to books that I do want people to read, and I have a few in gestation.
If you've read all of this long, meandering post, which I'm composing late on night in a Sunday, then I think you might be crazy. But it's been good for me to reflect on the past nine years. More to come.
TL;DR I went off and became a hugely successful Hollywood actor winning all sorts of acting awards, which is why I don't write anymore.
So what's been going on with Sylvester lately? (It's presumptuous on my part to think that people on Goodreads care when I'm a such a small fish, but sometimes writing something out is more helpful for my own thought process and is good for reflection. If somebody actually reads this without gouging their eyes out: great! But otherwise it's good for me to just work away on the keyboard).
Let's backtrack a little. In 2015 or 2016, when I started my Goodreads account, I had returned to school as an undergrad studying for a second career. My first novel, A Detective from Geoduck Street, had been long in gestation, taking almost 20 years for me to put together, and I FINALLY finished a presentable (or so I thought, at the time) draft for self-publication in Fall 2015. It was a massive undertaking, and I know now that it was too big for my own good.
When that was completed, I, like many first-time authors, had high expectations. But while I made a few sales, I was disconcerted by the overall lack of response to it. It has taken years to get feedback from it in the form of reviews. Geoduck Street is a celebration of the Pacific Northwest region of Washington, Oregon and British Columbia. While I stopped short of making it secessionist literature, I did what I could to make it known to the Cascadian bioregional movement. Yet despite some initial interest, no one seemed to care enough to write a review. There was radio silence, and I began to question my enthusiasm for the project since no one else was enthusiastic.
There were two breaking points for me that moved me away from continuing with sequels to Geoduck Street.
First of all, I became annoyed how, after devoting significant years of my life to a project about the Pacific Northwest, some joker would create the "Doug flag" on a pair of socks, or a coffee mug, or a restaurant napkin, and suddenly receive 5,000 upvotes on the Cascadian subreddit, while any post I made about my book would be lucky to break 12 upvotes. I'm not complaining. Obviously my first book was a defective piece of writing, or something else non-positive about the book prevented people from enjoying it enough to write reviews. I own that. It's no one's fault but mine. I still love Geoduck Street and stand by whatever merit it possesses, but the tome needs a second edition. It needs a $5000 editing job and a $300 professional cover. Will I ever have the money to do that? I'm better off now than I was in 2015, but I can't say that I have a wad of cash like that sitting around.
The second reason I never pursued completing sequels was, quite frankly, the U. S. presidential election of 2016. I wrote Geoduck Street after having lived in the South, horrified that we in the Northwest share a common government with those states. I was a foreigner down there! Geoduck Street was something of a means of reclaiming an identity for myself. But Donald Trump (and his allies in Russia who would love nothing more than to see the United States fracture) has come along and put American democracy and freedom on life support. It's made me rethink my identity, and the positives of the United States, just as Billy Crudup in "Big Fish" is forced to come to peace with Albert Finney (or was it Brian Cox in that movie? Quite frankly, I can't tell the difference between the two). The system shock of the Trump presidency made me completely rethink the Union and its fragility. No matter my annoyance at the South, Vladimir Putin is a true enemy, and I have no further interest in American regional fractures at this time. I feel naïve now for having placed so much stock in regionalism for that book.
Following the completion of my second undergraduate degree, I headed off to start a second master's degree in 2017. Graduate school sucked. Big time. I survived, but it was one of the most stressful times in my life. I had forgotten how professional programs break you into pieces so that they can shape you back together again the way they want to. It was cognitive boot camp, and it wasn't fun, especially since I was an older student with a brain less neuroplastic as it once was.
Yet during those years I still managed to get some time in for writing. If I had gone all week without breaking from homework/studying, I would have burnt out. So between getting home on Fridays and waking up on Sundays, I enforced a "no school thought" policy for myself. Saturdays actually became extremely productive for me, and I self-published some of my best work during that time, all of them short stories or short story collections.
The standout was Piano Happens, a Dunsanian fantasy I wrote in spring 2018. I say "Dunsanian", but there were other humorous influences from the world of nihilism there, including Roadrunner cartoons and the Seinfeld sitcom. My original intention was to write fifty-one stories, just like Lord Dunsany's Fifty-One Tales, except that they all include the hero or heroine of the story getting killed, one way or another, by a piano. The last story would feature a character much like myself who intended to one-up Dunsany by composing a fifty-second tale, except that before he could do so, he would meet his untimely fate... by being crushed by a falling piano.
Such was my state of mind in graduate school, when I had so few outlets from the stress I was living through. After completing twenty stories, I put it aside and decided I would complete it at a different time. A year later, in spring 2019, I started reviewing the draft of Piano Happens with the intention of starting up again, only to find that it was perfect as it was. The twentieth story offered something of a conclusion, and even if I added another thirty tales as I planned, I was no longer in the same state of mind as I had been in 2018, so I went ahead and published it after going through the editing process.
Then, in May of that year, I received my first Amazon review. It was for Piano Happens. It came from a total stranger, and I'll never forget where I was standing when I read it on my Amazon page. To the stranger who wrote it: Thank you. I needed that positive reaction more than you could ever know.
I published a few more short works in 2019, and then my professional life completely took over. I needed to stay eye-on-the-ball with vigilance, and did so. I graduated at the end of 2019 with my master's degree and went to work for a company where I had interned. Life did a turn-around on me, and suddenly everything was nice and peaceful.
Then COVID-19 struck a few weeks later. I lucked out better than others, which is not to say that I wasn't stressed or impacted by it. At the time, I was working on another tale from Slorsh (the series that Piano Happens belongs to), when suddenly I couldn't go to Starbucks anymore and compose by longhand. I was aggravated by that, but never resentful, because I understood that my own personal situation could be worse. I'd wake up in the middle of the night from a dream in a cold sweat, thinking I was still in graduate school, only to come to the joyful realization that grad school was completed for me. Instead, all I had to worry about anymore was dying a miserable death from a painful disease, losing loved ones to the disease, and the country imploding into a dictatorship with a potential reelection of Donald Trump. Knowing that the grad school dream was ONLY a dream allowed me to go back to sleep with a smile on my face. At work, I masked up and happily followed health protocols, and decided to take the opportunity of the bizarre situation by doing something different: I started an e-comic and studied drawing for a year and a half.
The website I set up for that comic is now shut down; when the pandemic ended I went back to writing. But my interests and priorities have shifted away from my pre-pandemic interests.
Since 2021, I've been working on composing my own personal mythology. It's unavoidably a little like Tolkien's, but it's also more dreamlike as Dunsany's Pegana mythos and Lovecraft's Dreamland tales, and also weirdly individualistic like William Blake's mythology. It's less like Tolkien's Silmarillion, and more like his original "Book of Lost Tales", in that it's unkempt and full of wild flavors than need be harnessed and toned down. The first year I just worldbuilt and wrote out sketches, then in 2022 I slowly put together a publishable draft, which I produced at the end of the year. In 2023 I expanded and edited the 2022 draft, and now in 2024 I'm expanding and editing the 2023 draft. It's my magnum opus, and I plan on publishing a new edition of the work every year for the rest of my life. It's nothing I actually want to share yet, so I set a ridiculously large price so that no one would buy it.
But sooner or later I'll have to turn my attention back to books that I do want people to read, and I have a few in gestation.
If you've read all of this long, meandering post, which I'm composing late on night in a Sunday, then I think you might be crazy. But it's been good for me to reflect on the past nine years. More to come.
TL;DR I went off and became a hugely successful Hollywood actor winning all sorts of acting awards, which is why I don't write anymore.
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